European Wireless 2011, April 27-29, 2011, Vienna, Austria

ISBN 978-3-8007-3343-9 VDE VERLAG GMBH

Wireless M2M Communication Networks for Smart

Grid Applications
C. Wietfeld, H. Georg, S. Groning, C. Lewandowski, C. Muller and J. Schmutzler
TU Dortmund University
Communication Networks Institute (CNI)
Dortmund, Germany
Email: {christian.wietfeld, hanno.georg, sven.groening, christian.lewandowski, christian5.mueller, jens.schmutzler}
@tu-dortmund.de
AbstractFuture Smart Grid applications rely on highly
reliable and secure connectivity between various infrastructure
components from utilities, grid operators and households in order
to cover requirements on communications for smart metering
and decentralized energy management including electric mobility.
Therefore several approaches for communication infrastructures
are currently discussed based on different architectural concepts
including wired and wireless access and inhouse communication
technologies. In this paper we provide an overview on wirelessenabled networking architectures and discuss two exemplary
network planning approaches. On one hand, network planning
algorithms for the neighbourhood area network (NAN) are introduced. On the other hand, we present results for an integrated,
wireless network coverage-aware planning of public and private
charge point locations. In addition we address in the paper the
design and implementation of embedded, wireless Web Services to
enable the efcient and reliable data exchange within distributed
energy systems. The paper concludes with the comparison of two
approaches for the optimal coding of energy-management-related
SOAP messages.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Future Smart Grid applications rely on highly robust and
secure communications between utilities, providers and households in order to cover the demands on smart metering, energy
management, decentralized energy generation and electric
mobility. Therefore several approaches are currently discussed
based on different architectural concepts including wired
and wireless access and inhouse communication technologies
[16],[17].
In order to meet the limitations of resource-restrained ICT
infrastructures for large scale roll-outs, two major areas of
interest are identied in this work:
Demand-oriented M2M access network planning
Application protocol optimization in resource-restrained
M2M environments
In the following section II an overview on the use of
wireless M2M technologies in Smart Grid applications is
presented. Moreover a decentralized system architecture focussing on the ICT integration of households is presented
and discussed with respect to various application scenarios.
In section III a method for hierarchical demand-oriented
network planning is described in which multiple technologies
are combined and real-world measurements are included.
Optimizations on the application layer are discussed in section

Paper 1569422357

IV and nally the paper closes with conclusions and an outlook

on future work.
II. C ONCEPTS AND R EQUIREMENTS FOR ROBUST M2M
COMMUNICATIONS IN S MART G RIDS
Various Smart Grid approaches are currently discussed and
evaluated in different pilot projects with respect to different
application scenarios (see Figure 1). The driving force of
establishing an ICT infrastructure and enabling enhanced
energy management services is given by smart metering applications, which started to appear for industrial and commercial
customers in recent years [7]. New solutions based upon the
use of wireless (e.g. UMTS, GPRS [6]), wired (e.g. Powerline
Communications, DSL) as well as P2P (e.g. Goteborg [8])
wide area communication systems enable smart meters to
transmit their metering data, receive tariff information and
provide additional information to customers. With DLMS
[1], SML [2], M-Bus [3] and the upcoming Smart Energy
Prole 2.0 [18] various M2M interaction schemes are offered
providing data containers, reliable protocol operation and security mechanisms. Recent efforts in energy efciency induced
by statutory directives combine smart metering services and
dynamic tarifng for multiple metering devices (energy, gas,
heating, water, etc.) for private households with less frequent
metering intervals due to data protection regulations. Based
upon this approach and due to different technology lifecycles
new architectural concepts are introduced by decoupling metering devices from ICT technologies with ICT gateways [4]
for aggregating metering data and bridging access networks to
inhouse networks.
By establishing an ICT infrastructure for metering gateways,
enhanced energy management for decentralized power generation (e.g. solar panels, wind power, power-heat coupling) and
demand side management (e.g. household appliances, electric
vehicles) are feasible for private households. The integration
of these components together with decoupling of ICT and
energy components comes along with the necessity for reliable
inhouse communication networks which increasingly use wireless technologies for interconnectivity. For this purpose several
solutions are discussed and evaluated, like wireless M-Bus
[4] and KNX-RF [4] for transmission of metering data. For
inhouse energy management and home automation ZigBee,

275

Inhouse
Applications
Load Management of
Appliances

Energy
Trading Markets

Infrastructure
Components
Regional Energy
Marketplaces

E-DeMa
Marketplace

EU
DSO
TSO

Management
HAN Gateway

MRO
AGG

Management of
Distributed
Generation

Metering
HAN Gateway

Prosumers

Meter Reading
Operator
Distribution
Network
Smart Metering for Electricity, Gas, Water, Heating

Powerline
Wired ICT Infrastructures:
ISDN, DSL, FTTx, Cable, PLC
Wireless ICT Infrastructures:
GSM, LTE, WiMAX

Abbreviations:
EU: Energy Utility
DSO: Distribution System Operator
AGG: Aggregator
MRO: Meter Reading Operator
BST: Base Station Tranceiver

BST

Home Area Network

Neighbour Area Network

Fig. 1.

Wireless M2M Communication for Smart Grids

Wireless LAN, narrowband RF systems as well as several

Powerline Communications (PLC) technologies are used.
A further application scenario with additional requirements
on the ICT infrastructure is the integration of electric vehicles
(EVs) into smart grid infrastructures. For the integration of
charge spots into the Smart Grid basic functionalities for
billing, accounting and invoicing are required. Here the use
of wide area mobile communication modules based on 2G,
3G or 4G networks will be deployed. In long term, with
an increasing market penetration of EVs the charging power
will increase especially with DC fast-charging stations being
deployed. Without the coordination of simultaneously charging
EVs the risk of local substation blackouts increases. Therefore
a reliable wide area communication link is an essential core
requirement which deployed system must meet in the mid to
long-term. Based on this idea this work focusses on demandoriented network planning combined and evaluated by realworld measurements and optimizations of application layer
protocols in resource-restrained environments.
In order to ensure transparent connectivity to all inhouse
components the comprehensive introduction of HAN Gateways is one of the central elements for combining the high
demands on security and providing an extensive connectivity
to the prosumers household. On the one hand the gateways
act as rewalls, on the other hand the gateways provide
connectivity to all HAN entities. Thereby functionalities like
smart metering for multiple metering devices, Demand Side

Management for loads and decentralized energy generation,

as well as User Interaction are provided by the gateway.
The HAN Gateway collects and stores metering data from
several metering devices, such as electricity, gas, water and
heating meters using dedicated wireless technologies like
wireless M-Bus, KNX-RF or ZigBee. The collected data is
bundled and securely transmitted to the meter reading operator
using wireless wide area point-to-multipoint technologies, e.g.
GSM, UMTS, WiMAX, LTE or via meshing technologies
using ZigBee. Alternative to these approaches wired solutions
are used for inhouse and wide area communication but are not
taken into the following considerations.
The energy management can be done either through the
prosumer itself, motivated by tariff or through the Distribution
Network Operator for controlled or emergency load reductions.
Therefore interfaces to the prosumers appliances, loads and
local power generation components are provided by integrating these components into the prosumers inhouse network.
Depending on an external pricing information several loads
can be controlled, e.g. the charging process of electric vehicles
as well as controlling home heating systems or an intelligent
washing machine makes use of the dynamic tariff information
by starting the washing procedure in low tariff periods and
avoids starting it in high level tariff periods. In addition to
this, the connection interface can be used for maintenance,
remote conguration issues and rmware updates.
One of the key capabilities is the integration of decentralized

276

1500 m

Longitude

is also providing management and installation services to the

prosumers. In order to maintain a reliable ICT infrastructure
between the HAN Gateways and the marketplace, a HAN
Gateway Operator provides the reliable ICT components for
software updates, administration and conguration issues.
III. D EMAND -O RIENTED N ETWORK P LANNING
In the following, we address two different network planning
scenarios. In the rst scenario, a methodology is introduced,
which allows for the comparison of different network planning
algorithms in real-life scenarios to minimize the infrastructure investment. In the second scenario, the identication of
optimal locations for private and public charging spots is
addressed.

0m
0m

1500 m

1500 m

Latitude
(a) Satellite View

A. Network Planning for Neighbourhood Area Networks

(NAN)

Household with
Smart Meter

Longitude

In this scenario, the focus is placed on the dimensioning of

the neighbourhood area network, in which the so-called concentrators play an important role. The concentrators exchange
data with the Home Area Networks via the ICT gateway
in each home. Concentrators provide wide-area connectivity
with corresponding hardware costs. Therefore the aim of the
different algorithms is, to reach all HANs with minimum
number of concentrators (i.e. 100% coverage). We have investigated different algorithms, such as demand-oriented and
coverage-oriented algorithms. In addition a greedy algorithm
has been rened through a iterative analysis of the positioning
of the nodes to achieve a maximum coverage with a minimum
number of nodes. In the following, exemplary results are
presented:

0m
0m

Latitude
(b) Simulation environment

1500 m

100%
90%
80%
70%
Coverage

Longitude

Number of communication nodes in range

1500 m

60%

50%
40%

Optimized
adding algorithm
Greedy
Addinggreedy
Algorithmus

30%

Area oriented supply

coverage
flchenorientierte
Versorgungsdeckung

20%
10%

Demand oriented Versorgungsdeckung

supply coverage
nachfrageorientierte

0%
0

Fig. 3.

50

100

150
200
Number of concentrators

250

300

Comparison of the automated network planing algorithms

0m
0m

Fig. 2.

Latitude
(c) Network analyzer results

1500 m

Demand-Oriented analysis and network planning

power generation systems, which will make up a large part of

the energy generation of future systems. Nowadays an increase
in local power generation installation can be observed, e.g.
solar panels, wind power plants and combined heat and power
generation. A central controlled energetic recovery system
is necessary to meet the requirements of the energy grid
quality management. Referring to the communication market a
dedicated infrastructure has to be provided by an operator, that

Figure 2(a) shows a satellite image of the reference scenario

and Figure 2(b) is a screenshot of the simulation in the
discrete-event simulation environment OMNeT++. In Figure
2(c) the results of the Network Analyzer for the scenario at
a transmission distance of 50m and 10m analysis interval are
shown. Along with the number of communication nodes in
transmission range the color change from dark blue (small
number) to dark red (high number).
Based upon this analysis an automated network planning
algorithm solves the optimization problem which is based
upon a set-covering location problem (see Figure 3). The
procedure in the case of a complete supply coverage is
continued until all smart meters are provided.

277

B. Wireless network aware planing of electric vehicle infrastructures

Next to the simulation of network availability real world
measurements at specic positions for the inhouse ICT infrastructure and charge spots need to be accomplished. This
chapter introduces a measurement environment for analyzing
the availability of 2G and 3G cellular networks. It can be
applied in both the inhouse energy management domain and
the electric mobility domain. As already mentioned in the
previous chapters electric mobility also needs to be integrated
in intelligent smart home ICT infrastructures (see Figure 1).
The roll-out of electric vehicles (EVs) will rise in the medium
term and charging infrastructures are needed in the home
environment because most of the EVs will be charged at
night when the prices are low. For the charging process
of an electric vehicle a long range communication interface
(2G or 3G) is installed in current charge spots (CS) for
communication with the e-mobility-Hub (EM-Hub) a central
data platform for authentication, invoicing and billing. Due to
potential radio reception problems in garages and basement
garages we propose to use the long range communication
interface provided by the HAN gateway infrastructure to
establish this reliable link in home environments. This link
can be realized e.g. with DSL but also with wireless wide area
communication technologies. As the metering infrastructure
is in most cases located in the basement of houses the radio
reception problems can appear in this case as well and need
to be avoided by measurements before the installation. When
the reliability of this link is secured an integration of the CS
in the HAN can be accomplished using different short range
communication technologies, e.g. Powerline Communications
(PLC) or wireless technologies of the IEEE 802.11 family or
IEEE 802.15.4.

Fig. 4.

UMTS measurement for potential home charging spots

Figure 4 shows an exemplary measurement of 3G UMTS

network availability in a garage. An attenuation of minimum
15dBm can be seen in the whole spectrum. Therefore a UMTS
connection between the CS and the EM-Hub cannot be reliably
realized using UMTS in this environment. This measurement
was accomplished with a handheld spectrum analyzer FSH8

and an isotropic antenna TS-EMF of Rhode & Schwarz. This

equipment is also content of the measurement setup developed
for cellular network availability measurements in public and
semi-public areas which is shown in Figure 5. In these areas
the HAN gateway infrastructure is not available and 2G, 3G
or in the future 4G cellular networks need to be utilized. To
ensure the connectivity of the CS and therewith the reliable
communication to the EM-Hub an infrastructure plan for 2G
and 3G networks in Berlin is created in the research project
e-ikt [5]. For this infrastructure plan measurements of GSM
(900 & 1800 MHz) and UMTS (2,1 GHz) are accomplished
at potential positions for public and semi-public CS analyzed
by project partner TU Berlin.

CNI Measurement Software

ESRI ArcMap

MySQL
DB
USB

MeasurementEquipment

Fig. 5.

Control &EvaluationEquipment

Measurement environment for cellular network availability

The measurement setup consists of Measurement Equipment as well as Control & Evaluation Equipment. The Measurement Equipment contains the before mentioned spectrum
analyzer, antenna and additionally a GPS module. With this
module the exact position of the measurement point can be
determined. The measurement reports and the GPS position
will be passed via USB to the CNI Measurement Software
on the Control & Evaluation notebook. The measurement
reports are stored in a MySQL database and consists of
maximum values of GSM900, GSM1800 and UMTS spectrum
in dBm as well as screenshots. For the reason that these
spectrum measurements do not contain provider information
a GPRS/UMTS USB modem is installed to get additional
information like the signal strength, cellID and connection
mode for a special provider. With these information the
spectrum can be mapped to the frequencies of the network
providers. For consolidation and visualization of the collected
data ESRI ArcMap is used in combination with detailed maps
provided by the administration department of Berlin.
Figure 6 shows the visualization of the communication
infrastructure plan in Berlin with several measurement points
around the potential CS position in Berlin. It can be seen, that
the radio reception already differs in a small local change.
Therefore real world measurements are important to enable
the reliable communication between different entities of the
smart grid.

278

80m

100m
GSM900

GSM1800

UMTS

Fig. 6. Visualization of measurements for potential public electric vehicle

charging spots

IV. W IRELESS M2M A PPLICATION L AYER

C ONSIDERATIONS FOR S MART G RID I NFRASTRUCTURES
The integration of Smart Grid components in existing internet infrastructures plays a major role for sustainable and
cost efcient deployment of the Smart Grid. Within this
background being cost efcient and compatible is a balancing
act between using efcient communication on ressource constrained links and for being compatible, using state of the art
web technologies, which has been designed for workstations
und broadband internet connections. At this, nding an optimal
balance is a major challenge, which can be achieved by
optimizing the radio protocol or increasing the efciency at
the application layer. For that and with respect to the identied
application scenarios in section III-B, this section focuses on
increasing the application layer efciency by using state of
the art Web Service-based service provisioning and efcient
data transport on the application layer for wireless M2M
communications. [15]
Interoperability and loose coupling of autonomously acting
services are just two prominent characteristics of Web Services
which make them a perfect t for the integration of Smart
Grid components. Both characteristics are achieved through
the strict adoption of open and standardized internet protocols.
A. Scalable and adaptive Service Provisioning for Electric
Mobility
As previously stated in section III-B for the service provisioning two domains can be identied. First the inhouse energy
management and home automation domain which is limited
to a minor number of devices and bounded to one IP subnet.
The second domain combines a major number of devices like
all public charge spots of a city connected by long range
communication technologies (e.g. LTE, UMTS or GPRS).
Furthermore a combination of these two domains is also
conceivable. For example inhouse components or charging of

electric vehicles in private IP subnets can be securely activated

or deactivated by the external Smart Grid infrastructure for
energy demand clearing through the aforementioned HAN
gateway.
Web Services are concrete implementations of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) [13] principles. The SOA paradigm
is often also referred to as the SOA triangular involving service providers, service brokers and service consumers. Since
Web Services are initially evolved as interoperable business
environments, Web Services were predominantly deployed
as static, always available services. This changes with the
emergence of services adopting the Devices Prole for Web
Services (DPWS) [10] specication including the Web Service Dynamic Discovery (WS-Discovery) [11]. Target services
like inhouse energy management and home automation are
dynamic and might underlie a higher rate of change. This
characteristic of target services also implies complex enhancements to the Service Broker being the responsible entity for
service discovery. Typical standards and implementations like
UDDI do not handle highly dynamic service availability.
The initial ad-hoc discovery mechanism of DPWS is constrained to local area networks since multicast messages are
used for discovery of new devices and services. These messages are not supposed to pass subnet boundaries in standard
network environments and therefore are especially qualied
for the inhouse domain. The WS-Discovery specication is
an approach driven in conjunction with DPWS to handle
service discovery in dynamic environments. The specication
proposes self management in local environments and involves
central service brokers the discovery proxies (DP) for wide
area environments. The self management in local environments
is important for a high acceptance of future Smart Grid
devices. It brings USB like plug and play functionality to the
IP networking domain. The DP as a central service broker is
tailored towards the second, more scalable domain and provides means to combine both domains. According to the nature
of the used wireless cellular wide area networks the discovery
is expanded to more than one subnet and may be combined
with a Network Address Translation (NAT) [12]. The use of
a discovery proxy and unicast instead of multicast messages
provides a suitable solution for this challenge. Furthermore,
due to the multicast suppression the use of a discovery proxy
causes signicantly reduced network latency and also reduces
network load.
Hence DPWS including WS-Discovery extended with the
DP functionality is a potential technology to cover service
provisioning in the identied domains for future Smart Grids
including electric mobility applications.
B. Efcient Data Transport for Web Services using SOA
One of the major principles of Web Services is interoperability. Hence Web Services heavily rely on W3Cs XML as
a core language in order to provide information between heterogeneous communication entities. As Web Services initially
evolved in the internet for business environments, the primary
target platforms were servers and workstations.

279

provided by the MORE middleware. Hence a service description forwarded to the SOA Proxy Service initiates an on-they creation of a mirrored DPWS compliant service endpoint
on the proxy, allowing other clients or services to interact with
the target service through standard SOAP interaction with the
DPWS service endpoint created on the proxy server.
Adoption of the SOA principles allows a message size
reduction of at least 70% (in some cases even 98%). This
leads to a major decrease of communication latency since both
the transmission delay due to the limited bandwidth of the
communication channel as well as the processing needed for
serialization and deserialization are reduced.
The impact of blown up XML-based SOAP communication
on embedded systems and wireless communication links is not
a new topic. To counter the overhead problem of XML, W3C
specied the WAP binary XML (WBXML) which is a binary
representation of XML and therefore much more efcient with
respect to the information per byte ratio. Both standard XML
and WBXML are used for the performance evaluation of Web
Services.
A comparison of the average message size transmitted using
WBXML and SOA compared to an equivalent XML message
is shown in gure 7. The result conrms the completely
different approach between the two compression methods:
Because WBXML generates an additional, static overhead
compared to the existing XML structure, the compression
rates increases while raising the content of a message. This
is founded by the increasing number of elements transmitted
in the example message. At the beginning the additional
overhead has a big quota on the message size transmitted using
WBXML and the average message size commutes in about
80%. While increasing the transmitted elements, the quota
of the additional header reduces compared to the compressed
XML structure and the average message decreases to a size
of 44.4%.
100%

80%

Compared to SOAP size

As described before in section IV-A, a current trend is

bringing the benets of Web Services to the embedded domain.
This is primarily reasoned due to the fact that embedded
systems and especially mobile devices like smart phones
and handhelds become less resource constraint with every
year and therefore suit the requirements for interaction with
web services or even hosting their own. However, there is
still a need for supporting very constraint, low-cost devices
and also bandwidth limited communication channels (e.g.
ZigBee), as they exist in wireless M2M networks and will be
predominantly used in large scale Smart Grid deployments.
Lots of research has been spent in reducing the amount
of data to be transmitted over the communication channel by
compressing the XML payload of the messages (e.g. GZIP,
WBXML). But this approach is not sufcient in case of some
wireless M2M applications since the applicability to resource
constrained embedded systems for both processing messages
for serialization / deserialization and the resulting message size
being reduced in an easily adoptable and revertible way, must
be proven. The approach in this work involves an intermediate
SOA Proxy Service. This SOA Proxy Service performs
transcoding between typical Web Service based SOAP messages and purged binary SOA messages.
The SOA Proxy Service is an infrastructure service developed for the EU project MORE (Network-centric Middleware
for Group communication and Resource Sharing across Heterogeneous Embedded Systems), which has been an European
research project focusing on the development of an OSGi
based middleware using DPWS based communication between
embedded devices for realizing multiple Web Service based
services, the so called MORE services. The SOA Proxy
Service is a MORE service providing:
Transparent Proxy Support: SOAP enabled proxy service
representing SOA enabled devices as standard DPWS
compliant endpoint.
Reduced Messaging Overhead: By utilizing the SOA
Protocol the overhead on the communication channel
between two nodes is drastically reduced.
These two options extend the Discovery Proxy previously
described in IV-A with typical proxy functionality as it can be
found in generic web proxys. Hence, a mirrored DPWS service
endpoint can be provisioned and also accessed with or without
additional message reduction methods through this extension.
When using the message reduction, the proxy translates each
message between the sender and receiver from SOAP to SOA
or vice versa.
The message transcoding is based on the WSDL description
le of the target service, which forwards the denitions to
the Proxy Service at the beginning of a service interaction.
Based on the structure of the WSDL, the SOA proxy service
builds a binary message schema for all possible message
exchanges specied within the WSDL for the target service.
The implementation for the target service and the adoption of
the binary message structure are also automatically built based
upon the given WSDL. The SOA proxy service is built upon
the MORE Core and adopts the OSGi lifecycle management

60%

Min 45,4%
40%

Max 28,4%
20%

0%
0,69

0,74

0,83

1,02

1,40

2,16

SOAP Size [kByte]

Fig. 7.

3,68

6,72

SOA

12,79

24,95

WBXML

Average message size of WBXML and SOA compared to SOAP

The compression ratio of SOA shows a completely different behavior. Due to the fact that SOA uses the service
specications dened in the WSDL, there is no need for
additional header information and so only the actual values are
transmitted. This leads to an oppositional behavior compared
to WBXML and achieves the best compression rate while

280

transporting only a few elements (about 1.2% of the equivalent

SOAP message, as seen in 7). Raising the content using SOA
results in an anti-proportional increasing message size. This is
due to the fact that more elements are transmitted within a
message, the less is taken part by the removed XML syntax
information compared to standard SOAP.
In comparison, both approaches reach a point of saturation,
at which SOA shows a rising logarithmic behavior whereas
WBXML shows a falling logarithmic behavior.
V. C ONCLUSION
This paper presents a general technical overview considering demand-oriented communication networks in terms of
future Smart Grid applications. At this, especially methods
for planning and optimizing wireless communication networks
and achieved results are presented.
Current challenges and possible application scenarios in
the eld of Smart Grid have been shown. An overview of
applicable state-of-the-art wireless technologies for realizing
Smart Grid applications is provided and results in the presented architecture for realizing a Smart Grid. These efforts
are currently worked out in ongoing research projects like
E-DeMa and e-IKT. In order to provide means for cost
optimization of the deployment phase a simulation and realworld measurement based network planning methodology is
introduced. From the rst results it can be concluded, that
measurements at dedicated positions for HAN gateways and
charge spots need to be accomplished in order to ensure a
reliable communication.
Furthermore the paper presents rst results of the SOA
messaging framework providing optimizations on web service
communications in the application layer. Future work will
investigate SOAs performance compared to other current
state of the art approaches like Efcient XML Interchange
(EXI) [14].

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The work in this paper was partly funded by the
German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology
(BMWi) through the projects E-DeMa (reference number
01ME08019A) and e-IKT (reference number 01ME09012).
The authors would like to thank the project partners
RWE, Miele, SAP Research, Siemens, ProSyst, SWK,
Ewald&Gunter, ef.Ruhr and TU-Berlin for fruitful discussions
within the projects.
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281